Failing to notice (cold, cold) reality

Failure

1. Writing an adventure story
2. My seventh form art folio
3. Being a rock star
4. Looking cool
5. Being a poet
6. Being a playwright
7. Being an academic
8. Writing a novel
9. Having a wildly successful blog

Here is a dull way to start a post:

It shows unemploment rates in  New Zealand from 1986 to 2009.  The green  line is the unemployment rate for people over 19 years  of age, and the blue line is the youth unemployment rate.  As it happens this is a very important piece of information when it comes to my life story.

When I finished  high school at the end of 1990 I decided that I would get a part time job, save some money, and then go to France.  I would do this with a friend of mine,  and while we were in France we would get part time jobs, travel and I would do things like write poetry.   As you can see  this was a cast-iron, well thought out and totally idiot-proof plan firmly based in reality.  Without going  into all of the reasons that this was never, ever,  ever going to work, let’s go back to the graph.

With the exception of right now, the worst time for a youth to look for a job in the last twenty-five years was between  1991 and 1995.  In 1991 I was a fellow with no work experience, questionable fashion sense, a quiet and mumbly personality, and bursary.  The amazing  thing  is that I actually got two job interviews.  One was for the Government Press, and the other for a travel agency.   I was unsuccessful in both cases.  This little brush with job  hunting taught me  two things about failure.  Firstly, you really need to be aware of  your environment before you pour your energies into a project.  It would have been useful for me to have read the newspaper in 1991 and discover the youth unemployment rate’s historic high.   Secondly, on the whole if you are going to do well in something  you need to be able to sell yourself to a certain extent.  This was surprising  new information for me in 1991.  I suppose I had envisaged life as being a series of opening  doors, and was shocked to discover that  you not only had to get off your arse and go and knock at doors yourself, but that most of those doors would remain closed,  and  if they opened at all it would only be a crack and you would have to talk your way in.

So I did what  any sensible chap would do at this point: I went  back to school and stayed there for a long  time.

Actually looking back on these six months at the beginning of 1991 I think I learned a lot about life.  I was on the dole at that time.  I sometimes have students at  my school who tell me they are going to leave school when they are 16 and go on the dole and that it will be sweet getting free money for doing nothing.  In my experience  it was sweet  for about a month and then it was crap.  Mainly it was crap because I had dreams (the  go to France thing), and the dole in no way allowed you access to those dreams, but it was also crap because I lost touch with all of my friends who were off doing exciting things at university while I went stagnant, and  because reporting to my Employment Officer at Work and Income, and looking through the  job listings,  and  getting rejection letters every week was a soul destroying process that made me feel worthless.

Nevermind, in these difficult times before I scurried off to university halfway through 1991, I had recourse to poetry.  For some reason I have  kept the notebook where I wrote out all of the “good” copies of my poems from this time.  My god it is bad.  Bad,  bad,  bad.  It is so bad I hestitate to put any of it here, but this would be cheating.  So here we go.  Two representative pieces.  I had only two themes it would seem (both cliched).  One was unrequited love, and the other was generalised anger at society and feeling that life was meaningless.

Untitled (II)

Do you watch  the games I play            (soccer?)

Did you see what I say                             (did I what now?)

I felt like falling at your feet

If I thought you would see                  (but otherwise forget it)

I can say I love you today

And wait and see what you say

If I’m waiting it’s raining

May I stand in your eyes and shine?      

 (sound of retching from audience)

Sorry.  One  more.  This one is about being misunderstood (man).

I believe

Don’t you come across trying to analyse me

I’m a man  that’s  all I’ll ever be

I don’t even know who I am

How can  you pretend to understand?

Don’t give me your meaningful stares

I’ve got passions, more than you could bear

I feel like a stone with a heart inside

I’m burning up but I’m cold in your eyes.

Oh  boy. 

Firstly let me say that these poems are not addressed to anyone in particular.  Not the horrible, vomit-inducing “love” poem, or the laughable crappiness of the nobody-understands-me poem.  My favourite line is “I’m a man that’s all I’ll ever be”.  It makes me laugh out loud every time I reread it.  The follow up line  is pretty good too giving us the one-two punch  of “this is what I am/I don’t know what I am”.  I also quite like how both poems really rise to the occasion at the end.  That whole rain/shine, stone/heart, burning/cold thing is awesome.

The failure here  is clear.  It is the inexperienced writer resorting to hackneyed ideas.  I abandoned poetry and went into lyric writing  at which I was a bit better  (but not much).

Many years later I went on a creative writing  course  for secondary school students and  their teachers.  Before we went we were asked to write a poem  about a piece of clothing,  and a short story about an animal.  When we  were  there we were split into groups and shared our poems  and stories with each other.  I am a great fan of the poem  I wrote for this exercise, which coincidentally was  about the period that I have covered in the last couple of posts and the leather jacket I am wearing in the Jim Morrison post.  I was sufficiently encouraged by my peers to send it off to a literary magazine, but it was rejected – “quite good of its type, but not original” – which was wounding  enough  for me to retreat completely from the field.  Handling rejection is another thing I am bad at, and a very important  thing you can  learn  from  failure, but this will be in the next post.

Anyway, here is the poem.

I loved my leather jacket

I gave it to my now vanished friend

back when I was a lizard 

king,  back when I  thought

I could do anything

before I got fat, old and bald

before I found I was not at all

the hooligan  I wanted to become

but preferred quiet nights in

reading.

Time has failed to be kind (2/2)

Failure

1. Writing an adventure story
2. My seventh form art folio
3. Being a rock star
4. Looking cool
5. Being a poet
6. Being a playwright
7. Being an academic
8. Writing a novel
9. Having a wildly successful blog

All you need to know about 1991 is that The Doors directed by Oliver Stone was released.

It would be an understatement to say that this movie had a big impact on me.  I remember going to see it with all my university mates at the Regent, and being so overwhelmed that when I staggered out at the end I actually had to sit down again on the steps and try and deal with it.  My head was spinning.  I had seen who I wanted to be, and that person was Jim Morrison.

I quickly began to investigate The Doors and Jim.

All purchased in 1991.

The stuff that really blew my mind was the whole idea of poetry and rock and roll and theatre blended into these epic ten or fifteen  minute songs like The End and When the Music’s Over.  I also loved all the stuff The Doors did after Jim died with his spoken voice  and their backing tracks.  For a while I was convinced that he actually was a poet.  I bought his poems and studied them.  I lent  this book  to a friend  whose mother found it in his bedroom, picked it up  and read  the following:

f*&ked  with the negroes

in cabs of the drivers

F&*ked little infants of North

Indo-China

Branded with napalm  and  screaming

in pain

Which I think might have been Jim’s anaylsis of the Western war machine, but didn’t impress friend’s mum who asked him to remove the book from her house and never let it cross her threshold again.

So, because of Jim, I wanted to be a poet, and a rock star, but I also wanted to look something  like him.  Which had obvious problems.

The orginal:

And me:

I’m not sure what’s going on with the shirt because I usually wore sort of paisley shirts open to the belly button with a t-shirt underneath and a couple of long necklaces flapping around.  One of the necklaces was even  the utterly conventional jewellery of the desperate to be unconventional: the peace sign.

Somehow it just never works: this desire to copy your heroes.  Whole industries are made out of it though.  You see the glamour and the fashion writ large in a movie, or in a magazine, and you try to emulate it out of the bargain racks at Farmers, or some cast off at a second hand store.  Jim  Morrison  stalks through your consciousness,  a silky poet of the shadows, while you plod through suburban Karori in sweaty cowboy boots and get told off by your mum for not mowing the lawns.

I “achieved” this look for all of about six months before the gods got a hold of me.  Firstly, I had started wearing contact lenses, mainly so that  I could wear sunglasses, and  picked  up a really bad dose of conjunctivitis which meant that I not only had crusty, watering eyes but that I had to give up contact lenses (and sunglasses) and go back to glasses.  Let me tell you, there is no way that you can wear sunglasses over a normal pair of glasses and look cool.  No way.  

Secondly, my premature balding picked up pace.  Again, no way you can look cool with long hair and bald patches.  Forget it.  My hairdresser said the best thing to do when you started to bald was to get really short hair cuts.  I followed her advice.

So now I was a guy wearing all this Jim Morrison gear with a short hair cut and glasses.  Sort of like a desperately sad accountant going to a rock concert.

Then came one of the few moments  in my life when I actually had an epiphany.  Not a religious one, but one where you suddenly realise something and make a radical change.  I was walking  from my mother’s house to the bus stop to catch the bus to university and I developed this odd feeling.  For a while I couldn’t figure out  what  the feeling was, and then  I realised that it was the feeling  you get when you realise you look like a total knob.  I mentally went through  everything I was wearing:

• Biker jacket (but you’re not a biker)
• Pirate shirt (but you’re not a pirate)
• Peace necklace (but you don’t give a toss about peace)
• Cowboy boots (but you’re not a cowboy)

I stopped, turned around, walked home and  took it all off.

Which was probably a good thing because I was never going to be Jim Morrison.  Failing to become Jim Morrison gave me a chance  to start becoming John-Paul.

Not that abandoning Jim made the fashion road any easier:

I  think this look could be called “Don Johnson at the wine bar”.  I used to love this jacket.  I thought it was dead sophisticated.  Unfortunately for this jacket – aside from the fact that it was white – it had shoulder pads which tended to look a bit ridiculous.  Nevertheless, even  though this particular outfit is a bit silly it was more or less where fashion was taking me after Jim had been  jettisoned: down the dark path towards normality.

Where I am happy now.  In my jacket and tie.

I am always pleased when a student  in one of my classes shows up with a ridiculous hairstyle, or wears the most outlandish possible fashion to mufti day.  It is as it should be.  The young laughing at the old; the old laughing at the young.

Time has failed to be kind (1/2)

Failure

1. Writing an adventure story
2. My seventh form art folio
3. Being a rock star
4. Looking cool
5. Being a poet
6. Being a playwright
7. Being an academic
8. Writing a novel
9. Having a wildly successful blog

The last lesson about failure was about how inspiring it can be.  This lesson is something to do with how the passing of time and a new perspective can turn success into failure.

The first fashion items I remember wanting were a tracksuit, sweatbands, and velcro running shoes.  It was the early 80s and sportswear was becoming  fashionable as daywear.  Also, velcro was considered pretty frickin cutting edge and I was highly impressionable.  After that, though, I can’t remember craving a look until I was at secondary school.  At secondary school I suddenly felt the need to be different.   My inner prima donna wanted to be noticed.  Partly this was because I was a teenager and wanted to buck against things, but mainly I think it was because I really detested the community I was living in.  Not my mates of course, but the stifling tedium of school and the flat, hot, deadness of a town that seemed like an overgrown retirement village.

It started with hair.

For reasons that I don’t really remember I decided I would get a perm.  My mother, who is always in  the background of all of these stories supportively screen printing Perverted Thrust T-shirts, or advising me about hair cuts, took me to a hair salon  upstairs in Coastlands  and helped me  express myself (I was a teenage boy) to a hairdresser.  The hairdresser gave me some hair style books to look through and I obviously flicked though to the section marked “Poodles” and then we were away. 

I was amazed at how long it took to get your hair permed.  You had to sit with all kinds of gloop on your head for ages, and only then  did the hairdresser begin to weave her magic on my locks.  Looking back I think this was an insight into the gruelling life of a world tour with Bon Jovi in the 80s.  Those guys must have  spent hours every single day getting  their hair done.  I think I got two, maybe three, perms in total before I lost patience with this particular exercise in vanity.

After I had been freshly coiffed I had an attack of nerves.  Perhaps, I suddenly wondered, I sort of looked like a tit.  I snuck out of the hair salon and along the balcony walkway of Coastlands.  I aimed for a set of steps I knew were very rarely used  and darted down them.  Naturally one of my best mates was standing at the bottom killing  time.  There was an awkward moment where he registered what I had done to myself,  and then he pulled himself together and we had an entire conversation in which he said nothing like: “You look like a complete dickhead”,  or “I think there’s a dog on your head”.  Sometimes it’s awesome  to be a guy.  All that repression.

Actually I didn’t catch any crap for my hair do.  In fact, quite a few girls commented on my new “do” approvingly.  Not that I did anything about this sudden female attention.  There were further  aspects of the look to get right.

Here I am with my sensibly dressed Gran in full Kapiti coast, man-gear: stupid hair, long t-shirt (Iron Maiden,  AC/DC = good, WHAM!, A-ha = very, very, bad), black stonewashed jeans, and basketball boots.  I was not cool enough to have an Iron Maiden or AC/DC t-shirt.  I think the main problem was that my mother would see me wearing it and  laugh at me.  Iron Maiden t-shirts, if you are not familiar with the oeuvre, feature a corpse like character looking satanic  and doing satanic things like hanging out in graveyards, satanically.  I once bought an album called Masters of Metal in Coastlands.  It had an utterly ridiculous cover featuring some kind of corpse with green eyes  wielding a sledgehammer (obviously influenced by Iron Maiden), and my mother in an act of sudden generosity snatched the record out of my hand and offered to buy it for me.  I was mortified.  She went up to the counter where, for some bizarre reason, there was some very matronly looking older woman working, and put the LP down on the counter.  They both looked at it, rolled their eyes and laughed.  I was at the back of the shop trying to hide behind a cardboard display case of Piano by Candlelight cassettes. 

It’s funny how you can think all the heavy metal imagery is cool in one part of your brain, and know that it’s dumb in another part.

Possibly my lamest form of protest was through the previously ignored vehicle for youth rebellion: the knitted  jersey.  Once you tear yourself away from my shapely legs and deflated perm, you will notice the jersey.  This was the first in a line  of jerseys that I wore and I can tell you that this was pretty fashion-forward for Kapiti in the late 80s.  In my defense please remember that The Cosby Show was popular at this time and Bill Cosby was taking the humble jersey to strange, garish new places.  Anyway, back to this particular jersey.  I had a friend  who particularly admired it and asked for the pattern (Christ! this sounds so laughable – how could I possibly be cool if I had friends who were asking to borrow the knitting  patterns for my jerseys?).  So I gave him the pattern  and he passed it on to his grandmother who… refused to knit it because the picture on the cover of the pattern showed a woman wearing the jersey.

I ask you, does this jersey look feminine to you?  I was incensed.  My manhood was impugned (my permed, jersey-wearing manhood).  I raged against such judgements.  I ordered another jersey from my Gran for next winter.  It was massive, it was lurid, I wore it defiantly in front of my friend on muftiday.  I rubbed his face in the yarn of gender-bending defiance.  Oh, the heady, heady days of youth.

All of this was just a jarring prelude however for the main course of my fashion silliness which bloomed in my first two years at university.

The sweet taste of failure (2/2)

Failure

1. Writing an adventure story
2. My seventh form art folio
3. Being a rock star
4. Looking cool
5. Being a poet
6. Being a playwright
7. Being an academic
8. Writing a novel
9. Having a wildly successful blog

I can remember the exact spot at school where we came up with name for our band.  The  adjective came first,  and it took about five metres for us to nuance the verb to perfection, and then we had it – somewhere between one end of the path that ran beside the staff car park and the other – that magical name: Perverted Thrust.

I think the “thrust” was inspired.  It makes you laugh.  It especially made you laugh if you saw Corran  do his comedy thrust whenever he said that word; a pelvic  maneuver that I think was inspired by the  motion that Flashheart used to make in Blackadder whenever he said “woof!” but with an added absurd  twitch.

The driving force of the band  was Corran.  He put us together for the Coca Cola Rockquest.  He put the band together by telling people they were in it.  He decided I was the singer.  He decided another guy was the bass player.  He knew someone  who could play drums, and someone – other than himself – who could play guitar.  He wrote the  song, and he supplied the garage for us to practise in, and then  he drilled us.  He was tough.  I think I was originally supposed to  be on rhythm guitar but wasn’t up to snuff so was demoted (I think that is the right word) to lead singer and someone  else was roped in on guitar.  The bass  player struggled  nobly for weeks to discover a sense  of timing  and  then Corran  fired him  and got Steve in. Steve wasn’t a bass player but  he  played the guitar and  said he’d do it.  His first rehearsal was our final rehearsal.

As it turned out Steve was not going to be the least rehearsed member of the band.

The night before our heat was the Seventh Form school ball at Southward’s Car Museum.  This is a picture of me in my rented tux the evening of the  big night.  At that time we had actually moved to Wellington, and I was spending two hours  each day commuting to and from school on the coast.  On  the night of the ball my mother  booked us some rooms at a motel on the coast, and  here I am in front of the motel room curtains.  The tux is standard issue, but for a touch of class in 1990 sparkly, crinkly waistcoats or cumberbunds were all the rage.  I got mine in a kind  of purply-pink – the kind  of thing you might wrap Turkish delight in.

I was neither Turkish, nor delightful.

As it turned out, going to the Seventh-Form ball was largely pointless exercise for me.  I didn’t have a date, and I didn’t dance.   I also didn’t go to any wild after-parties.  We had better  pass  over this evening for another time, and move  on to the next morning when I woke up in my motel room to some bad news.  A telephone call from Corran  told us that our drummer had decided to pull out.

If there was a single weak link in  our band I knew it was the drummer.  He was cool.  No one else in the band was cool.  You could see when we practised that he was just being  polite to us.  What he really wanted to be doing was hanging out with his cool mates.  Of course it was the cool kid who did the most uncool thing.

We were desperate.  I think my mother called the drummer’s mother and  pleaded.  He wouldn’t budge.  So we called another guy we knew who played the drums.  He said he would do it.  We were teetering on the  brink of farce, but it was exhilarating  to pile  in  my mother’s car and  drive to town.  We met the drummer at the Town Hall.  He had  his drum sticks.  Please bear  in  mind that he had never heard the song we were about to play.   It is also useful to know that he was a speed metal fan, and  we were attempting  a rock ballad.  We emphasised the words ”rock” and ”ballad” to him, and he nodded but he did a lot of nodding generally and I think it may have been coincidence.

The rhythm guitarist showed up in  a leg cast.  He had done something horrible to himself but he was enthusiastic.  Steve was trying to remember the song.  We sat down in the seats of the Town Hall and looked towards the fully lit and frighteningly equipped stage which seemed huge and serious.  Our band name was called first and we got to our feet with great bravado.  Throughout the darkened hall were scatterings of other  groups and their supporters.  Our name got a ragged cheer, and as we walked past the judges the guitarist for Chicago Smokeshop said, “Awesome name, guys”.

Walking  onto a stage like that is sort of like walking around to the  other side of the TV and looking at everyone sitting on the couch: it is quite a disorienting  experience to see and not be part of the darkened, anonymous crowd.  We took up our positions, and  I suddenly realised why no one else had wanted to be the singer; I was the dickhead who had to stand right at the front with no instrument  to hide behind and actually say something to the darkened mass.  Luckily I had decided to wear something inconspicuous.

There was nothing to do now but set Perverted Thrust loose on the world.

It went something  like  this:

Corran began by picking some chords in a slow, melodic manner  suggesting  to the audience that we were about  to launch into a rock ballad.   After two bars of this the drummer unleashed  himself at a furious tempo completely unrelated to what had come before.  Steve, after playing  his first note and realising that we were in serious trouble, stopped playing the bass and walked towards the drummer  waving  his  hands  like he was trying to bring in a plane to land.  I understood the  impulse but it probably didn’t inspire confidence in our prowess in the audience.  The  next cue was  for the lead singer and  the rhythm guitarist.  I opened my mouth and the rhythm  guitarist mashed his plaster cast down on his distortion  foot pedal and unleashed a sheet of feedback that I strongly suspect caused vomiting in some sections of the audience.  I was so alarmed  I missed my cue for the  first verse.  Steve returned to his bass  and doggedly attempted a bass line somewhere between the speed metal tempo of the drummer, and the lighter-waving, sing-along-ballad tempo of the guitarist.

The  strange thing about  this is that I felt calm and happy.  Here I was, on stage in a ridiculous T-shirt, with  a band that was spectacularly imploding all around me, and I was having a ball.  I waited for the chorus to come around and I sang it.  The song sort of began to come together (minus the drums of course, which never came together with anything but the thrash song in our drummer’s head), and soon enough we came to a shuddering,  sphincter-clenchingly, horrible end.

There was almost no applause.  I remember some brown kids in the front row looking at us with sort of disgust.  I thanked the audience anyway and we went off stage.  As I passed the MC he said, ”what the hell did you guys have for breakfast?”  I beamed at him like an idiot.  We walked up the aisle through the audience and out into the light of the foyer. 

We were elated.  We recounted every disaster to each other with rising joy.  Wandering  towards Manners Mall later in the day another band past us, and I heard one of the boys in the band turn to another and say in a sort of hushed awe: “That’s Perverted Thrust”.  My god, it was absolutely brilliant.  If you look at the photo that was taken after our performance, the one at the  top of the page, you will not see a bunch of dejected youths, you will see a group of very happy boys. 

We had actually done it.  It didn’t matter how bad it had been, we had gone through with it and  been bonded by it.  The Coca Cola Rockquest was a glorious failure that I built about fifteen years of being in bands and writing songs on top of. 

Corran and Steve.  Thanks man.  It was awesome.

The sweet taste of failure (1/2)

Failure

1. Writing an adventure story
2. My seventh form art folio
3. Being a rock star
4. Looking cool
5. Being a poet
6. Being a playwright
7. Being an academic
8. Writing a novel
9. Having a wildly successful blog

Where’s Wally?

I wrote this in January, 2009

Paraparaumu didn’t look like much to a teenage boy circling around the streets on his bicycle. It was mainly lawns and one-storey family homes with a scattering of kids’ trikes and rubber beach balls on the drive. School was school and the shops were boring, and because I was boring or unappreciative or something I didn’t like beaches, or swimming, or all the things people actually drove to Paraparaumu to do. Of course it was like any other place, and the waves, and the roads late at night, and the fields on the weekend, and the garages, and the bedrooms were full of teenagers acting out their dreams.

Corran’s bedroom always had the curtains drawn. When I remember his room it is always half dark, with an unmade bed, and balled up rugby socks and tops tossed into the corners. Corran himself used to sit on his low bed and huddle over his electric guitar. He was a good guitar player. Down the road was Steve. He was also a good guitar player. I spent less time at Steve’s place, but the rooms there were bright and full of light, and the house felt modern and ordered. I probably felt more at home in Steve’s house, but I think I only went there twice. I must have spent hundreds of days at Corran’s on the weekends in the late 1980s in Paraparaumu.

The way that I am going to separate Steve and Corran in this story is a little arbitrary. There were plenty of times when their musical tastes coincided, but my memory has sharpened the story this way so this is how it will be told. We also need to keep in mind that this was a time and a place where it really was not acceptable to try and be cool and not like rock music. While I went home and devoured A-ha, and Prince, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, my public self paid homage to rock bands. Which rock bands you wrote on your school bag, and the type of school bag you had were very important. The coolest kids had little canvas satchels with AC/DC, Iron Maiden and ZZ Top on them. I wasn’t cool. I had a Gino Borelli bag.

If I had to pick a track to represent Steve at this point in the 1980s it would be Satch Boogie, by Joe Satriani. I have the album this track is from: Surfing with the Alien. I don’t like it much, but I still like Satch Boogie. Satriani’s sound was very clean. The distortion on this album is light. He is a real technician, and there is always going to be a part in each song where he shows us how well he can do finger-tapping triplets. Eddie Van Halen was the popular master of this kind of solo.

For Corran I would choose a track that he never actually played me, but it somehow perfectly represents him: Wings of Steel by Stonehenge. American “heavy metal” bands had fancy clothes and big hair. The British version had smelly clothes, lank hair, and quite often beards or dodgy moustaches. Their music was often feral, sweaty, weighed down by stodgy British food and warm ale. Wings of Steel sounds like all that. It rumbles. It’s not quite perfect. It thunders and collapses into its changes, and then suddenly soars in a brief, beautiful arc. Corran listened to plenty of bands like this even if they weren’t all actually British. Man O’ War, Iron Maiden, earlier Def Leppard, Motorhead, Yngwie Malmsteen.

I should say that I never really felt at home in either camp though I enjoyed both for awhile. There were exceptions. I did like Steve Vai and Eddie Van Halen on the one hand, and I did like AC/DC and Guns ‘n’ Roses on the other. I was wowed by technique and sprezzatura in one case, and fascinated by the darkness, and blunted emotions in the other. I suppose that all three of us were busy learning who we were by trying things on for size. Because everyone else did, I wore stone washed black jeans, and long T-shirts, and basketball boots. Because my friends did I listened to WASP and Motley Crue and Skid Row, and even though I didn’t like them much, I didn’t know why, and so I kept listening to them.

In the end all three of us ended up in a band together. It wasn’t much of a band, and it only played one song at one gig, but it was something better than pedalling around the summer streets of Paraparaumu with nothing to do and nowhere to go.  As it turned out that one taste of being in a band, and the heady failure of it was enough to inspire me to persevere with music for decades to come.

It’s time to talk about the 1990 Coca Cola Rockquest.